If there’s a better public agency than the National Transportation Safety Board, we can’t find it.

It is universally admired for the professionalism and expertise of its staff members and for their independence from politics as they investigate accidents.

Admired everywhere, that is, except at President Donald Trump’s White House. The NTSB is the latest target of his assault on independent agencies, which should concern everyone who rides in an airplane, train or bus.

The president has now fired two of the NTSB’s five board members before their terms were up, defying a law that Congress wisely intended to wall off the NTSB from political influence.

The latest victim, Todd Inman, was the NTSB’s on-site representative for the investigation of the midair collision of a civilian airliner and Army helicopter that killed 67 people over the Potomac River in Washington 14 months ago.

The White House gave Inman no reason for his dismissal but told the media there were reports of him drinking on the job, harassing staff, misusing government resources and missing “at least half” of NTSB meetings. Inman denied it “categorically,” and said he would sue to keep his job. Inman is a Republican who was appointed to the board by former President Joe Biden.

Former NTSB vice chair Alvin Brown, a Democratic former mayor of Jacksonville, whom Trump fired without cause last year, is also suing. The Senate confirmed his Republican replacement, American Airlines executive John DeLeeuw, in a party-line vote last month.

Inman’s firing is especially suspect. It follows the NTSB’s final report on the Potomac tragedy, which was critical of two agencies under Trump’s command.

The report, issued six weeks ago, charged “systemic failures in airspace design, safety oversight, and risk management” by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Army. The Pentagon, under Pete Hegseth, doesn’t take criticism any better than Trump himself does.

Last-minute Pentagon opposition recently sabotaged House passage of a bill the Senate passed unanimously to require new collision avoidance technology on both civilian and military aircraft. It was one of the NTSB’s major recommendations.

News cycle after news cycle, Trump is alarming, disgusting or both.

— His fundraising committee, Never Surrender Inc., is soliciting contributions over the corpses of our dead soldiers. An email illustrated with a White House photo shows Trump in his banal ball cap, saluting caskets of Army reservists who died in his war with Iran, offering “private national security briefings” to donors. It is crass beyond words. Picture Ike, or Reagan, doing that.

— Trump played golf last weekend while his war worsened for our nation and the world. The lack of planning was confirmed by the Pentagon’s admission that it was unready to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and by Trump’s panicky, unsuccessful appeal for help from our allies. “This is not our war,” Germany’s defense minister said. The underestimated Iranian dictatorship shows no signs of giving up.

— Gas prices are up more than $1 a gallon in some places. Don’t worry, Trump says, because America is the world’s No. 1 oil producer, so “when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.” Who’s ‘we’? The Russians are making more oil money, too.

— The New York Times reports that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and one of his Middle East negotiators, has solicited governments in the region to invest $5 billion or more in his private equity firm. Such a gross conflict would be impeachable if Kushner held a Senate-confirmed post.

— There are disconcerting reports that Kusher and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s other amateur diplomat, went to their talks with Iranian negotiators without the aid of any U.S. experts on diplomacy, Iran or nuclear weaponry, and missed cues that could have prevented Trump’s war.

— Trump’s counterterrorism director, Joe Kent, resigned Tuesday, saying Iran posed “no immediate threat to our nation,” blaming pressure from Israel “and its powerful American lobby.” Kent is a right-wing extremist with ties to the antisemite commentator Tucker Carlson. It’s good to see Kent gone, but Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who opposed Kent’s confirmation, agreed there was “no credible evidence of an imminent threat from Iran.”

— FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is openly threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV stations that don’t report the war as Trump and Hegseth would like. Carr has less legal power than he seems to think, but the threat alone may be enough to tame some news outlets, and that’s what dictatorships do.

Along with manufacturing wars.

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